[Imc] doublechecking posting?

[Paul Kotheimer]

hi all:

first of all, special thanks to whoever moved my articles to the "Feature"
at the center of the imc page.  it's an honor. too bad i'm wearing such
stoopid socks in that photo.  a better photo can be found on
www.handmaderecords.com by clicking on the "ONLINE PRESSKIT" link. not the
one of me blowing smokerings.  the one of me in front of the Green Party
rally venue at UIC.


also:  if the attempted posting really has failed, could somebody please
try to repost the following story for me, or maybe even mark it up as the 
last in the set on the feature page?  please and thank you much.

TITLE:  Seattle, Revisited
AUTHOR: Paul Kotheimer
E-MAIL: herringb at prairienet.org
address: urbana.indymedia.org
phone: 217-344-8820
SUMMARY:  Observations on America, Seattle, and our mission from your
travelling songster/journalist, with big love to all back home in Urbana.

TEXT:

In at least one of the communities I participate in, when one receives a
new insight or question to ponder, it's common to think of it as an
"assignment."  Pille, my Vancouver host, showed me a poem of hers just
before I left for the Greyhound station on my way to Seattle, then
Chicago, then home to Urbana, Illinois; and I've taken it as sort of an
assignment.  The gist of the poem is this:  Think about community as an
OUTCOME, rather than as a PRE-REQUISITE.

It's this thought which I've been turning and turning over in my mind as I
make my way home from my visit to Canada.


THE POLICE AT THE PORT OF ENTRY SAY...

At the Canadian/U.S. border, southbound, there's a grey compound where
Customs & Immigration batch-process bus travellers.  The U.S. customs
police dress in black fatigues, high combat boots, bulletproof vests.
While the Canadian crew just a kilometer north look like, say, a friendly
Coast Guard in their loose-fitting yellow slickers, the Stateside guys
(and yes, they're all guys) look like the SWAT Team, like the riot squad.

Short, sharp orders echo through the processing room:  Luggage in two
lines in the center of the area.  Passengers against either wall.  All of
a sudden, it feels like, we're prisoners of war.

And, in a way, we are:  What with so much marijuana and heroin finding a
clandestine way down the West Coast, in from the Pacific by way of
Vancouver Bay, the Vancouver-Seattle crossing is a serious flashpoint in
Uncle Sam's never-ending Drug War.

The Customs Patrol captain walks a big, black labrador--yes, they have
DOGS--around the floor for a sniff at our baggage.  Every other bag or so,
the captain cues the dog with the the command, "Find it! Find it!"  None
of the travellers, no matter how minimal their English skills, needs to be
told what "it" is the dogs are scenting for.

No announcement is made to reassure us passengers that this is just
routine or to explain any motivation for the crackdown tactics at this
checkpoint.  That would have put us at ease--which, of course, is exactly
why it's not done.

Aside from the captain's commands, no one says a single word, in fact,
while the searchdog is at work, except for a fuzzy-faced college kid in
line ahead of me, who leans back and whisper-sings a quote from Pink
Floyd's "Money."  He sings the line that goes, "Keep your hands off of MY
stash."

The patrol guards also do NOT inform us that one of the bags in the lineup
(a dirty-looking Gucci purse) is the "doggie-treat bag," which the patrol
dog is trained to use in order to indicate that she is finished sniffing
for contraband and is ready for a snack break.  So, when the handsome
black lab singles out the Gucci purse with loud and agitated barking, and
the Captain of the Dogs abruptly tosses the handbag ten yards across the
holding area into a pen surrounded by chain-link fence, a good number of
passengers are visibly shocked.

In fact, one fellow passenger has to reassure a certain tired-looking
Albanian business traveller that, no, it wasn't heroin in the handbag--it
was dog food--and no, none of our fellow travellers is being arrested for
smuggling.

What more accurate way, I thought, to send a clear message to foreigners
and U.S. citizens alike?:  "We are in charge here.  These are our methods.
Welcome to the U.S. of A.  You're under arrest."  I haven't seen a more
telling performance since...well, since N30 in Seattle.


THE TORTOISE AND THE HURRICANE


The last time I was at the Seattle Greyhound station in the middle of the
night, there were storm troopers in full riot gear walking two by two
beneath the Christmas lights in front of the Westin Hotel and
opaque-windowed buses for prisoner transport rolling down Pine Street.

So it feels a little bit creepy to be back.

I get a dose of American youth hostel hopitality from the folks at the
Green Tortoise on Second and Pine.  Staffers there make it obvious that
they're in no mood to play nursemaid to any gutter-hippie parasites, and
they treat every guest with what appears to be an egalitarianism of
disdain.

For a late night snack, I hit the Hurricane cafe on Seventh and Blanchard.
After midnight clientele there include a mix of hipsters and street folks,
maybe a sex worker or two.  The street people who wander in to the coffee
counter seem to be in acute need of someone who will listen to them.  I
bum cigarettes and lend an ear as much as possible.  

Sallow looking twenty-ish waitress has a one-year-old at home.  She's so
tired she doesn't realize that she's snubbing a mixed race couple at the
end of the counter so badly that they read it as racism.  

Next, up walks some poor fellow, drunk as fuck.  Can't read the menu, says
he's dyslexic.  Doesn't know what he wants to eat.  He's bragging to me
about how he's got five thousand bucks in cash on him, in his wallet, in
his shoes.  He flashes his billfold, and I tell him to please put it away.
Hide it!  Take care of yourself! 


REVISITING THE ZONE


The next morning, I take myself on a walk through what I will always think
of as the Zone:  Sixth between Pike and Pine, where the shop windows were
busted out by the Black Bloc, where clouds of teargas rolled over the
sit-in participants, where protesters climbed the lightpoles and turned
over the newspaper machines.  Where a state of emergency and a suspension
of the First Amendment were declared.  What I see, of course, is nothing
like what I remember from N30.  

In November of 1999, I got no sense how upscale this area was.  It wants
to be the Miracle Mile in Chicago or some part of Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan.  Walking past the Nordstrom's and Planet Hollywood and Old Navy
and NikeTown, I'm struck by something I had completely forgotten:  that,
during the N30 direct actions, we not only disrupted the routine of the
WTO ministerial summit here in Seattle, but we really gummed up the
Christmas shopping season.  I mean, REALLY gummed it up.  Coming in from
out of town during the heat of it, it was difficult to get that sense of
things.

I pick up a homelessness support network newspaper from a grizzly,
old-west looking character stationed at Pine and Sixth.  We chat about the
good weather.  He explains that he's not allowed to take a step toward me
to shake hands because he can't be selling papers on private property.  I
ask him "What around here isn't private property?"

He points out the particular groove in the sidewalk which he's not
supposed to cross.

I make my way by bus to Capitol Hill to pass the afternoon with my guitar
at an outdoor table at Cafe Messiah, just around the corner from what was
Direct Action Network headquarters, until my host gets back in from
Spokane.  But would you believe the nerve of those bastards!:  Smack-dab
between two local coffeeshops on Olive between Broadway and Denny, they've
put up a Starbucks.  I make it a point to spit on their sidewalk on my way
from the Number 14 down the hill to Olive and Denny.

My Seattle host, Dawn, finds me at the Messiah, and we do a typical city
afternoon-and-evening:  A big lunch on Broadway, with occasional banter
and cigarette bumming with the displaced folks on the street.  A pitcher
of pale ale at the Hopvine, where a semi-homeless guy who loves to sing
and quote Shakespeare and quiz you on movie trivia, latches onto us for a
drink and a chat.  Monday night pool with some computer-programmer friends
at The Garage.

Driving home from that to try and get some sleep before my 6 AM flight out
of SeaTac, I ask Dawn to take me for a quick look at the King County Jail,
the site of so many nights of sleep-outs in solidarity with the Seattle
600.  I did one overnight there, after the release of one friend of ours
and waiting for the release of a second, the night of December 5th through
the morning of December 6th, 1999.

Dawn drops me off at the jail and says she'll circle the block and come
back around. 

The place where it all happened seems so very small:  There's the spot
where impromptu consensus meetings took place to decide tactics for jail
support without further arrests.  Here's where the whole group erected a
makeshift tent city in less than an hour when a cold rain started pissing
down.  There's where they came with the emergency blankets from the
shelter.  There's where the DAN lawyers made announcements for the crowd
to repeat so that everyone could hear.  There's the sidewalk where the
free breakfast was served for the hundreds of us that had camped out that
night.  And there's that cloudy green-grey plexiglass door, through which
came prisoner after prisoner after prisoner.

And there are prisoners there tonight, I remind myself, still eating the
meager bologna sandwiches, still subject to routine violence and
intimidation--all those things that the N30 crew got a little taste of
that week.


FLYING HOME


I don't know exactly what this has to do with my self-assignment based on
Pille's poem.  I don't want to sum it up in a neat package.  I don't want
this piece to be about nostaligia for the actions I participated in in
such a small way in 1999.  

Maybe what I'm seeing so far is that community, once we begin to think
about it as a desirable outcome, is also about process.  We see the
details of an antithetical outcome all around us:  alienation, addiction,
poverty, a war on civilians and civil liberties.  And we try to invent a
way of acting that can reverse those negative outcomes, in spite of the
pervasive power that keeps them in place.  I see my Seattle mini-tour as a
reminder of the big action and a contextualization of its aftermath.  And
that's why I bring it to you here on the website of our local IMC--seeing
that the global Indy Media Center movement is a palpable aftermath of the
anti-WTO actions of N30, 1999.

We are forming community right here on the indymedia.org sites, using
these technologies and these tools, working toward that desirable outcome.
I hope that's what I'm supposed to be learning.
 
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www.handmaderecords.com

c/o the School for Designing a Society
409 North Race Street
Urbana, IL 61801
217 384 0299 phone (no fax)